Cameron's Conservatives and the Internet

Change, Culture and Cyber Toryism

A. Ridge-Newman

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137436511
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The internet is changing the way we interact and communicate. But how is it impacting on more historically traditional institutions like the British Conservative Party? This book examines the role of specific internet technologies like ConservativeHome, Facebook, Twitter and WebCameron in the organizational culture of the Tory Party 2005-14.

1

Cameron’s Conservatives and the Internet

Abstract: This introductory chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book which examines Cameron’s Conservatives and the internet. The chapter questions the impact of the internet in the Conservative Party in terms of how it arrived, assimilated and developed in the party’s organizational culture 2005–14. It is argued that the use of a more holistic and cultural frame for the analysis of parties and media provides richer elucidations of phenomena. The chapter reviews a range of scholarly perspectives on the Conservative Party. It is noted that between 1997 and 2005, the Conservatives lagged behind their political competitors in terms of e-participation; and how, under the new leadership of David Cameron, since 2005, the party’s approach to the internet appears to have advanced significantly.

Keywords: Cameron’s Conservatives; Conservative Party; Cyber Toryism; new media; social media; the internet

Ridge-Newman, Anthony. Cameron’s Conservatives and the Internet: Change, Culture and Cyber Toryism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137436511.0004.

The Conservative Party endured 13 years in opposition, 1997–2010, while ‘New Labour’ presided over a cultural transition to a new millennium. From the illusive ‘millennium bug’ in the year 2000 (Y2K), to the first release of Apple’s ‘iPad’ in 2010, the New Labour period was partly characterized by developments in computer-mediated communications (CMC). Amid the backdrop of an increasingly complex, transient and globalized world economy, the internet – a dynamic and ever evolving international network of computerized digital communication that has allowed the development of user-led interactive multimedia technologies, for the exchange of commerce, communication, entertainment, information, learning and social interaction – has facilitated the virtual compression of time and space; and greater freedom, choice and access to information for the individual and collective groups (Green 2002; Youngs 2009; van Dijck 2012). In a new millennium characterized by advances in digital technologies, one question for scholars of the contemporary Conservative Party has been: how and to what extent has the party changed under the leadership of David Cameron? (Bale 2008). This book joins a number of wider works in the pursuit of the essence of that question (Snowdon 2010a; Snowdon 2010b; Bale 2010; Dorey et al. 2011; Heppell and Seawright 2012).

In the early 2000s, academic interest in how the internet might have been impacting on party change, notably, at that time, within the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties (Lusoli and Ward 2004), was beginning to emerge. However, there have been few published studies that explore directly and comprehensively the impact of the internet on driving change in the culture of ‘Cameron’s Conservatives’ (Bale 2006). This book attempts to go some way in addressing the gap in the scholarly literature with its examination of the role of the internet in the party’s organization, 2005–14. It consists mainly of an analysis of the party’s culture in the run-up to General Election 2010 (GE2010), which, for the purpose of this book, begins from the point at which David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005. Lilleker and Jackson’s study (2010) of Web 2.0 tools used by six party websites in GE2010 found that the political parties used differing strategic approaches to internet technologies. Therefore, comparisons with other parties are not made extensively in this book, because it would not significantly further enlighten an understanding of how internet technologies impacted on change in the specific case of the Conservative Party.

This book is largely a descriptive and explanatory study that sits between historical party analysis and the contemporary analysis of parties and new media. The work is influenced by cultural history and ethnographic methodology. It aims to understand culture change using insider knowledge of the Conservative Party. Furthermore, it aims to provide a more focused understanding of the role of the internet in any potential ‘decentralization’ of Conservative Party processes, rather than party policy. The book’s central aim is to build the case for the discovery of a new and somewhat latent technologically-fuelled organizational subculture observed within the Conservative Party between 2008 and 2010. In the specific case of the British Conservative Party, I call this integration of technocultural and political phenomena ‘Cyber Toryism’. The nomenclatorial inspiration for this came from Helen Margetts’ (2006) evocative model for ‘cyber parties’. Margetts presents the cyber party as a new party ideal type, which she argues to fit well the nature of party development in Britain. However, this book does not prescribe to the notion of party ideal types, but rather views them as useful indicators which, when integrated with a party’s unique cultural context, provide useful theoretical signposts for the identification of phenomena in relation to a specific party’s organization and culture.

Study of media and political parties

The theoretical foundations on which this book rests are influenced by the well-established central thesis of British liberal media history which states that the ‘process of democratization was enormously strengthened by the development of modern mass media’ (Curran 2002: 4). Historically, advances in the democratic process in Britain, like the five major extensions of the right to vote, between 1832 and 1928, were accompanied by significant developments in mass communications, like the supposed freeing of the press in the eighteenth century; and the growth in film and radio in the early twentieth century. These major developments occurred prior to universal suffrage in 1928. Therefore, this book is based on the assumption that, in terms of media power, the advents of the more recent mass communication technologies, like television and the internet, both of which developed in a period characterized by an historic peak in enfranchisement, have been unrivalled in their potential for impact as tools for democratic and political activity.

The intraparty dynamics, in other words internal interrelations, of British political parties, like the Conservative Party, can be viewed culturally. Internally, where the different organizational groups and factions interact, divisions and unifications of practices and values are identifiable (Bourdieu 1991). Between these dynamics, symbolic forms of communication are exchanged (Geertz 1973). Traditionally, few political scientists engage with methods that embrace the complex dynamics of political parties in a holistic cultural context (Baynard de Volo and Schatz 2004). However, with prominent work like that of Philip Howard (2006; 2010) and Darren Lilleker (2013), which places the role of new media in the wider context of changing political cultures, political science is recognizing more frequently the importance of culture. This book is influenced by Howard’s idea that, firstly, technology can evolve and, secondly, that it has the power to impact on individuals and groups. This supports the assumption, on which the argument for this book is based, that certain technocultural evolutions in wider society can lead to new technological innovations which have the potential to impact at micro- and macro- cultural levels in the Conservative Party. This book aims to explore this theme with a focus on the latent intraparty culture of Cyber Toryism through comparing different groups within the Conservative Party.

Scholars of political parties and political history have tended to divide themselves into subfields that address areas like political communication, party organization, party systems and party development. Political communication tends to focus on the marketing strategies that political parties use to connect with the electorate. Traditionally, scholars of party organization have been interested in the structural components of political parties (Lamprinakou 2008). Party system theory and party development have tended to a focus on generic party models and ideal types (Margetts 2006). Political histories often provide valuable panoramic views of the most salient aspects in the chronology of a party (Ball 1998; Ball and Seldon 2005; and Charmley 2008), but tend to focus on the upper echelons of party dynamics.

The outcome of these sometimes divergent approaches to the study of political phenomena has meant that our understanding of parties can be fragmented. Therefore, some often latent political phenomena have been neglected in academic research and scholarly literature. This book aims to take a more integrated and holistic approach to the study of internet technologies and the Conservatives. A further disciplinary influence that may be evident in this book is the anthropological methodology of New Ethnography. The research on which the book is based was especially influenced by the work of Alexander Smith (2011), a socio-cultural anthropologist who conducted an ethnographic study of the Scottish Conservatives. The aim for using an ethnographically inspired approach is to capitalize on my first-hand accounts and experiences generated while embedded in the field with Cameron’s Conservatives in the run-up to GE2010 and beyond. While maintaining a critical stance, the aim is to embrace personal and emotional responses in order to unearth what feels ‘anthropologically strange’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 2009) about contemporary Conservative Party culture.

The interdisciplinary nature of this book means that it draws upon aspects of a range of scholarly disciplines in the social sciences and, as such, does not claim to adhere to any particular discipline in absolute terms. Rather, it seeks to borrow deliberately selected aspects of appropriate theories and concepts, which in some way relate to the study of the role that specific internet-fuelled technologies have played in the Conservative Party’s evolving organization and culture. Max Weber’s significant works in political sociology, in which he ‘was less concerned...to analyse the historical structure of the state than to clarify the nature of the political phenomenon in general’ (Thakur 2006: 2) has influenced the thinking behind the approach that this book takes to understanding the Conservative Party. In line with the Weberian view, it is therefore appropriate to identify Conservative Party characteristics, such as its responses to the advent of new media, in order to determine what is significant about the party’s nature and evolution. Rather than extensively comparing multiple political parties, the book compares multiple groups and factions within the Conservative Party 2005–14. There is value in a focused case study because it can unearth the interactive dynamics of party phenomena, while allowing the study to be placed within wider time specific contexts (Lawson 1994). Furthermore, being mindful of the Conservative Party’s status as a prominent and elite institution in the history of modern Britain, this case study of party change presents a symbolic opportunity to include in the analysis a reflexive sensibility that helps inform our understanding of what such institutional change tells us about wider technocultural change in Britain.

New media and political parties

Before the widespread consumption of television in the 1950s, political strategy focused on the more simplistic forms of advertising and marketing (Wring 2007). Since the early 1970s, emerging technologies, namely computers, have been utilized to manage and process political information. At that time, scholars were interested in how parties were employing such technologies, for example the discovery that there had been a shift from handwritten letters to the use of word processing on a significant scale. Recently, we have witnessed new technological phenomena, namely the internet, impact significantly on society and culture (Dahlgren and Gurevitch 2005). However, some scholars warn that researchers should be wary of overstating the internet’s significance (Downey and Davidson 2007). This book positions itself in a similar mindset and, therefore, attempts to balance and contextualize its claims through setting the findings within wider historical and societal contexts.

In terms of political culture in Western liberal democracies, the advent of the internet has had its most notable impact in the US, first arriving to widespread prominence with the Obama campaign’s approach to online fundraising in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential Election (Vaccari 2010). This and other events have led many to view America as the home of web-campaigning. Furthermore, there has been greater academic interest in such phenomena in the US, with British scholarship remaining within what is currently viewed as a burgeoning field. Consequently, much of the work in the area of new political communications is centred on the United States and, in particular, American elections (Downey and Davidson 2007; Anstead and Chadwick 2009).

In Britain, the earliest mainstream political party websites were launched in the mid-1990s. The Conservatives launched their first website in 1995, a year behind Labour. However, such web presence is considered to have had only a minor impact on the 1997 General Election (Gibson and Ward 1998). At that time, general internet availability in Britain was limited when compared to the subsequent advances in broadband; and mobile and wireless technologies. Therefore, extensive investment in political internet technologies was not deemed as an election priority prior to 2001. In the run-up to the General Election 2001 (GE2001), market segmentation strategies, which were traditionally designed for mailing-out the direct marketing of hardcopies of political communications via the postal service, were beginning to be strategically applied to internet and mobile driven technologies like emails and text messages respectively (Ward and Gibson 2003). However, these developing technologies remained in a supporting capacity in terms of political campaigning.

Based on these trends and those observed in the US 2004 Presidential Election, General Election 2005 (GE2005) was expected to be hailed as Britain’s first internet election. However, the internet remained secondary to more traditional methods of electioneering (Ward 2005). There was no great qualitative advance in the impact of the internet in elections from GE2001 to GE2005 (Downey and Davidson 2007). Moreover, in between the two elections, the Conservatives lagged behind the other two major British parties in terms of its use of the internet for campaigning. Downey and Davidson’s (2007) review of British political party websites considers the main parties’ web content and format to have been generic; and that, at that time, the Liberal Democrats were leading the way in the online practice of political blogging.

Between GE2005 and GE2010, the Conservative Party underwent notable change (Bale 2010). Under the new leadership of Cameron, the party attempted to detoxify its dated ‘nasty party’ image and rebrand itself as an electable and progressive alternative to New Labour. Cameron’s contemporary style of leadership, while leader of the opposition, involved the use of internet applications like WebCameron, a video blog. This has been cited as the first significant case of e-politics in Britain (Downey and Davidson 2007). However, Ward et al. have suggested that rather than for use in political marketing, ‘internet-based technology might have a greater impact internally within parties’ (2005: 27). In part, it is this hypothesis that influenced the development of the research on which this book is based.

By 2005, the internet, as a tool for daily organization, had been assimilated significantly throughout British society and had grown to play a more significant role in the personal and professional lives of ordinary individuals (Livingstone 2005). In the cultural context, ‘evolution’ and ‘technology’ are often cited together, especially when researchers write about the rapid advances in ‘computerized systems for socializing’ (Hofstede et al. 2010: 471). In addition to Margetts (2006), there have been a number of additional scholars who have speculated about how the internet could empower grassroots participation in more networked and less centralized models of political organization (Bimber 1998; Pickerill 2003; Lofgren and Smith 2003). However, this book is not simply interested in analysing general trends in the use of social networks and other web applications for campaigning, rather it is focused on ascertaining whether the Conservative Party’s internal culture responded to the technological changes observed in wider culture and, if so, how it manifested itself in its organization and culture, thus providing an elucidation of Cyber Toryism. The book analyses whether changes were driven from the top or bottom of the party; and what the implications were and are for the central party and participants at the grassroots.

From 2005 to 2009, access to the internet in the UK rose by 18 per cent, from 55 per cent to 73 per cent (ONS 2006; Ofcom 2010). In the run-up to GE2010, like in 2005, there was significant excitement that 2010 might mark the first internet election in Britain, but instead the internet did not live up to expectations (Gibson et al. 2010a). In terms of general political communication in GE2010, one could be forgiven for overlooking the internet, and questioning whether, in fact, television was the actual new political medium in Britain at that time. Arguably, in some respects, GE2010-style political television was indeed a new medium in British election culture. It was the first general election in British history in which the party leaders went head-to-head in an American-style leader debate (Chadwick 2010). In terms of academic interest in political communications, the television debates have gazumped thus far the historical prominence of the internet in the campaign (Kavanagh and Cowley 2010; Wring and Ward 2010; Bailey 2011; Coleman 2011; Coleman et al. 2011; Lawes and Hawkins 2011).

Literature on the relevance and activity of the constituency campaign in GE2010 is relatively thin. Fisher et al. (2011) found that in general local campaigns used a mix of new and traditional campaign techniques, but the internet was generally low on the agenda. This corresponds with findings outlined in Chapter 7. Rachel Gibson (2010) explores the role of Web 2.0 in the autonomy of participant activity across the main parties in GE2010 and argues that social media has begun to empower activism, but not to the degree observed in the US. Perhaps the reasons for this lie in the different political communication contexts and cultures inherent to the British and American cases, resulting in the US having a more fertile environment than the UK for e-politics (Ward 2005; Gibson et al. 2010b; Williamson et al. 2010). In the Australian case, Gibson and McAllister (2011) found that there were greater electoral benefits to having a candidate website than using social media in the 2010 election. Works such as these tend to address and compare the overarching activities of parties in Britain and other Anglophone political environments. Relatively few works address in detail the role of the internet in the Conservative Party’s organizational culture 2005–14.

Investigating Cyber Toryism

The central problem addressed by this book is to understand what impact the advents of specific internet technologies have had upon the British Conservative Party. The word ‘advent’ is important in terms of exploring the research questions, because the book seeks to elucidate an understanding of how internet technologies, as new media, have arrived, assimilated and developed in Conservative Party organization and culture, 2005–14. The intraparty dynamics are considered to be organizational phenomena within the internal environment of both the local and national Conservative Party in England and Wales, which this book refers to as the party’s organizational culture. Each presented case study is deemed to be unique and individual in terms of its countless variables. The book understands political...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Camerons Conservatives and the Internet
• 2  Tory Elites and Centralized Internet Operations
• 3  Blogs: The Conservative Home?
• 4  Facebook: New Face of Conservative Organization?
• 5  In the Net: Joining Camerons Conservatives Online
• 6  Surrey Conservatives and the Internet
• 7  Anglesey Conservatives and the Internet
• 8  Cyber Toryism
• Bibliography
• Index